


emotional motion sickness

by RunawayCaboose



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, M/M, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:21:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24612955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RunawayCaboose/pseuds/RunawayCaboose
Summary: Jared has tried his entire life just to get through it, just to last this day, and then the next day, and then the next.
Relationships: Jared Dunn/Richard Hendricks
Comments: 3
Kudos: 9





	emotional motion sickness

**Author's Note:**

> so huge trigger warning for suicidal thoughts & actions. this is supposed to have multiple chapters. title is from the Phoebe Bridgers song Motion Sickness

If you had asked Jared if he minded not having any friends he would have said no. He would have said no, I don’t mind, in fact I almost prefer it. But that was a lie, probably the one he told himself most often. He was lonely, incredibly lonely. He had never been this alone before. When he lived in foster homes, there were always other children. People who he could relate to, going through the same things as him. It was lonely, but in a different way. The relationships he made never lasted long because he got moved around so often, and they were children so there wasn’t really a way for them to keep in touch. But it was nice to feel a sense of solidarity, even as a child, to know there were people who understood.   
Moving from that environment to college was a big change, one Jared wasn’t really prepared for. He no longer had all those people who understood, instead it seemed like nobody understood. Nobody understood why they shouldn’t yell around him, or why he flinched when someone tried to high-five him, or why he couldn’t sleep a lot of nights, or why he kept food in his room until it started to go bad and even then had a hard time throwing it away. But during his time at Vassar he had friends, even if they didn’t understand him. He was active in the acapella group, in the LGBT students community, he almost became president, but decided his skills would better serve as secretary.  
His time at Hooli, after he graduated, had nothing that either of the previous stages of his life had. He had no understanding, people still tried to high-five him and he still flinched, he got yelled at by his boss all the time and routinely cried while he drove home, and he had no friends either. There were people who were workplace acquaintances, who he would talk to while making tea and laugh and chat and pretend to be normal, and the people he knew through volunteering at the old folks home. Ethel and Muriel, who gave him lifesavers and that kind of cookie that comes in the tin everyone keeps their sewing supplies in. They were nice, but they didn’t really know him, and he always put on a happy face around them because he didn’t want to trouble them with his problems when they had their own.  
Jared had cried on his way home from work today, he knew it was probably unsafe to drive while crying, that tears made your vision sub-par and crying made you emotionally vulnerable which made you more likely to crash from road rage, but he did it anyway. He didn’t want to cry in the Hooli parking lot, someone would see him, and either ask him what was wrong or make fun of him. He didn’t want to deal with either.  
How would he even answer, if someone asked him what was wrong? Say “Well, actually, my boss yelled at me today because he thought I forgot to prepare slides for a meeting which was actually scheduled for tomorrow, and when I told him that he blamed me for putting it on his calendar when really that’s his secretary’s job, not mine, but I didn’t want him to yell at her so I just let him yell at me”, and they’d ask “Who’s your boss?” and he’d say “Gavin Belson” and they’d say “Gavin’s not really like that, he probably just had a bad day”. If that was true, Gavin Belson had a lot of bad days. Jared suspected he had some kind of anger management problem that could probably be managed through routine meetings with a therapist, but he was not going to say anything of the sort to Gavin’s face.  
Jared had stopped crying by the time he pulled into the parking lot of his condo, but he still felt raw. He turned off his car and sat for a few minutes, taking deep breaths, a meditation technique his last therapist had taught him before she retired. He needed to find a new therapist, he knew that, but he was so busy with work. He looked in the mirror, looking into his slightly red eyes, and rubbed them, deciding that he didn’t look like he’d been crying too hard so he didn’t have to stay in his car any longer.  
His apartment was empty when he entered it, like it always was. He had considered getting a pet, but he thought that might be rude, considering how many late nights he had to pull and how most animals thrived on human companionship. Instead he had gotten a Marimo moss ball which lived on his table in a fish bowl. He cared for it deeply, but it was a rather one sided relationship. He still hadn’t named it despite getting it a few months ago, and he felt like he should name it, but he couldn’t really find a name that fit. He was never good at naming anything, the few stuffed animals he had as a kid lived without names. My therapist would say, Jared thought, staring at the moss ball as it slowly bobbed in its water, that not naming things is indicative of how I don’t believe the relationships I have or things I own will be in my life for very long, so it’s safer to not name them so I won’t form a deep relationship with them and be hurt when they go away. His therapist had praised him, a few times, on how insightful he was into his own psyche, and how he could have been a therapist himself if he had wanted to, but really Jared only said what he thought people expected him to say, and his therapist wanted him to have insight, so he said things that seemed insightful. He sighed and set his laptop bag on the table.  
It hadn’t been a good day, but it hadn’t been the worst day either. Sometimes it’s just a lot of little things that build up and become something awful. That’s what Jared felt like now. It had been so many bad days in a row, and really when were they going to stop? He was going to be working at Hooli forever, for however long his life would be, and he would have bad days for however long his life would be. Nothing would change, he would still be Jared, or Donald, the same person regardless, and his job would still be the same and his life would still be the same.  
He cooked something for dinner, he almost had to because of his dietary restrictions. Ordering out could kill him by cross-contamination, and they didn’t really sell that much microwave ready gluten free vegetarian food at the grocery stores he frequented. He was making paella, following a recipe he had found a few years ago. He had gotten quite skilled at cooking for one over the years. He was dicing an onion when the knife slipped, catching his finger. He put the knife down and lifted his hand up, watching as the cut began to bleed. It wasn’t a particularly bad cut, not very deep, but it broke something in him and he could feel it.  
Jared walked into the bathroom and opened his medicine cabinet, retrieving a bandaid and wrapping his cut finger in it. He grabbed the bottle of Seroquel he had been prescribed a few months ago, but stopped taking when it made him too tired to do his job. He had looked up a while ago if you could overdose on it just out of morbid curiosity, and found that indeed you could. He put on his vest from where he had taken it off and hung it over the back of a chair, and put the bottle of pills in his pocket. It was conspicuous, these pockets weren’t really made for carrying pill bottles, and he couldn’t fit his hands in beside it.  
He had made it down to his car before realizing he had forgotten his car keys, so he decided to just walk. He had thought about killing himself more than a few times, and made a vague plan but never really tacked down the details. He wouldn’t kill himself in his apartment because he didn’t want his neighbors to find him, and a suicide negatively affects property value and that wouldn’t exactly be fair to whoever profits from the sale of his condo after he’s dead, tanking their sale price just because he couldn’t live with himself any longer.  
Jared walked until long after it got dark, but it wasn’t really dark because of the lit up buildings and street lights. He got to a place which seemed okay, a street with businesses, it couldn’t be residential because he didn’t want children to find him when they went out to the buses in the morning. There was even a bench he could sit on while waiting to pass out, how nice. There was a man sitting on the bench, drinking a coffee and doing something on his phone, but Jared could wait, it wasn’t like he was in a rush. He walked past the man and sat down on the bench on the other end, leaving as much space as he could between them, it just seemed polite. The man looked up at him.  
“Do you, uh, like want me to leave?” He asked, Jared shook his head.  
“No, please, you were here first.” Jared said. The guy shrugged and looked back to his phone, occasionally glancing over at Jared. Eventually he cleared his throat and spoke again.  
“Please don’t like, think I’m a freak for being out so late, I know it’s past midnight, I’m not like a predator or something trying to catch people out late.” The guy laughed a little bit. “I just have insomnia and I know, right, coffee and screen time don’t really help with that, but, hey, it’s decaf, or at least halfcaf, and I’m on computers coding all day so I think I’m immune to blue light by now.”   
“I really don’t think that’s how it works.” Jared said. “Actually I think that makes it worse. It’s past midnight?” He didn’t know the time, he hadn’t checked his phone since he started walking.  
“Yeah.” The guy glanced at his phone. “It’s like 12:35. Wait, you’re also out here really late, I don’t think I have to explain myself to you. What are you doing out here?” Jared thought about answering honestly for a second, but hesitated. People didn’t always like honesty when it came to feelings.  
“Do you want me to be honest?” Jared eventually asked.  
“I mean, yeah, I’m asking, so I guess I do.” The guy answered.  
“I’m going to kill myself.” Jared said, and he folded his hands in his lap. It’s something he did even in therapy, switching to a very business person when talking about something emotionally heavy. The guy made a strangled sound that sort of sounded like a half-laugh, half-moan.  
“I mean, yeah, okay, I think I asked for that, to be told that, I mean, I literally asked to be told that.” There was silence for a few seconds, the guy was turning his phone on and off, probably a nervous tic. Jared felt bad for making him nervous. “So, do you have a plan? That’s a stupid question, yeah, you have a plan, you just told me you were going to. Uh, why do you want to? Kill yourself, I mean.”  
“My job, mostly.” Jared answered. “Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had plenty of things happen to me, but my job is happening currently, so it is the most pressing problem.”  
“What do you do?” He asked. Jared wasn’t sure if this guy was asking just to try to talk Jared out of killing himself, or just to make conversation, or gathering information when he called the cops on the crazy suicidal guy on the bench, or what, but at this point he wasn’t really sure if he cared.  
“I work at Hooli.” Jared said. The guy’s eyes widened.  
“Shit, man, I work there too. I code there, and working there can totally make you want to blow your brains out- shit, was that insensitive?” He asked.  
“I don’t mind.” Jared shrugged. “Some people might, though.”  
“Okay. What do you do there?”  
“I work for Gavin Belson, directly under him, he depends on me for lots of things.”  
“Shit, that must suck, that guy’s an asshole. All his ‘change the world stuff’, it doesn’t mean anything, I think the guy just talks out of his ass.” The guy said.  
“You could say that, a fair amount of people probably think that.” Jared nodded. “You’re a coder there?”  
“Yeah, it sucks, the culture Hooli has is like, exactly the opposite of what they say they have. It’s just like high school, with cliques and bullies and shit, it’s stupid, honestly.” He had stopped turning his phone on and off, Jared noticed. “I’m, uh, Richard. Richard Hendricks.”  
“Jared Dunn.” Jared introduced himself back and Richard nodded.  
“Do you want me to like, help you? I don’t know if I could actually help, I’m not good at dealing with stuff like this, but I could like, call the police? Or not call the police, maybe? I read something once about how you should either never or always call the police on someone in a mental health crisis, but I can’t remember which one it was, that’s definitely not helpful.” Richard was actually trying to help, Jared thought that was kind of him, to try to help someone he didn’t know and could be dead the next day.  
“I don’t know how you could.” Jared answered. He was being honest with Richard, it was the first time in a while he’d been honest with anyone. It didn’t feel bad, it felt kind of nice.  
“I mean, I kind of had a nervous breakdown in college and, like, my friends totally thought I had gone off the deep end and was going to kill myself, no offense, and I don’t really think I was, but they were super worried about me so we had, uh, we had lunch together everyday and they walked me to my classes and they didn’t let me be in my dormroom alone, and it was annoying, how much attention they payed to me, but it kind of helped, you know?” Richard asked.  
“I don’t really get lunch breaks, not on most days, but I can see how that would be helpful for someone in that situation.” Jared nodded.  
“Well, we don’t have to do lunch, it could be like, dinner, or- or video games. I don’t know, man. I like barely know you, I really only know your name and where you work and that you’re going to kill yourself, but it kind of freaks me out that somebody I know could kill themself, you know? Like a reminder of mortality, I hate it when people die, it doesn’t even really make me sad, I just hate it because then I have to think about death and shit. So like, don’t? Don’t do it? Like the opposite of the Nike slogan. Because then I’d like, see it on the news and then I’d feel really guilty like, I could’ve helped this guy more, and then I’d need therapy or something and I really don’t want to go to therapy.” Richard was rambling a little bit, but cut himself off.  
“I’m sorry,” Jared apologized, “that I put you in this situation.”  
“Shit, man, you don’t have to be sorry, just, like, wait a week. Wait a week? And we can hang out or something.” Richard offered. A week more of working for Gavin Belson didn’t seem monstrous, just five days and two days off. He had made it this long, he could wait a week, and if he really didn’t want to, he could just not wait  
“Okay.”  
Jared took a Lyft back to his apartment that night, he had walked ten miles and by the time he had walked back he would have been late for work. He had exchanged numbers with Richard, but they didn’t actually make any plans. He put the pill bottle on the table next to his moss ball, and went to bed with his clothes still on.


End file.
